Services like telecommunication, messaging, radio/television broadcast, and web browsing are increasingly using the same IP based transport technology. Converged IP networks will eventually enable a blending of those services. At the same time, demand increases for a personalized user experience: e.g. enjoying your favorite content regardless of network access type, terminal, place or time.
A streaming content refers to a media or multimedia that is continuously received by, and normally displayed to, an end-user while a provider is delivering it over a communications network. Unicast protocols send a separate copy of the media stream from the provider to each end-user. This is simple, but can lead to massive duplication of data on the network. Multicast protocols undertake to send only one copy of the media stream over any given network connection, i.e. along the path between any two network routers. However, all network segments do not currently support IP Multicast.